College Degree vs. College Education ???

Donald Simanek, a physics teacher, presents some challenging ideas regarding collegiate education:

Even in the best of universities, some students get through with good academic records and still are not well-educated. They coasted through college without letting anything touch their minds. They didn't let academics interfere with their social life. We should not allow this to happen. It is a good thing for such students that most jobs that require a college degree do not require a college education. It's also a good thing that high intellectual ability isn't required for success and status, as anyone who has a boss knows.

What will the rest of the people do, those who can't earn a degree? The same things they do now with one. Most jobs that now require a college degree don't require a college education. The requirements of such jobs are easily met by trade schools or a year or two of community-college courses. For many employers a degree merely certifies that the person had four years to 'mature,' during which time he or she had to meet arbitrary standards, do unappealing and boring work, submit to authority without complaint, and not give up. That molds the sort of worker that business and industry like.

But there are a few modest steps we could take to improve education somewhat. Schools have become so cluttered with non-academic components that they have forgotten what ought to be their purpose.

The purpose of education is not merely to accumulate facts and information or job skills. Those are auxiliary functions. Facts and information and skills are necessary: they are the fodder for thinking. The purpose of developing the mind is to enable us to better acquire, evaluate and interpret information. But mere information, without thinking skills to evaluate and implement it, should not be worthy of academic credit. This suggestion is really quite radical. Even in the best universities, in the most 'academic' fields, evaluation systems give credit for memorized information.

I ask my academic colleagues this hard question. "In your exams, what percent of the points could be earned by a student who was merely a good memorizer of facts and procedures but understood nothing?" Few can honestly claim any less than 50%. I consider this to be the real scandal of education.

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/decline1.htm